9 July 2012

Lenin’s 1917 “The State and Revolution”
is a classic that we will get to later on during this course on “The Classics”.
What we can say about it now is that in that book Lenin goes through some of
the other classics, just as we are doing now. In particular, he devotes a whole
chapter to the Paris Commune, basing it on Marx’s classic book and today’s
featured Classic, “The Civil War in France”.

A downloadable file of Chapter 5 of Marx’s book is attached
and linked below. Let us defer to Lenin and use some of his work as our main
introduction to it.

Early on in his “Paris Commune”
chapter, Lenin refers to another classic, the Manifesto, pointing out that it
was modified by Marx and Engels after 1871. This is what Lenin says, while
quoting them:

‘The last
preface to the new German edition of the Communist Manifesto, signed by both
its authors, is dated June 24, 1872. In this preface the authors, Karl Marx and
Frederick Engels, say that the programme of the Communist Manifesto "has
in some details become out-of-date", and they go on to say:

‘"... One thing especially was proved by
the Commune, viz., that 'the working class cannot simply lay hold of the
ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes'...."[1]

‘The
authors took the words that are in single quotation marks in this passage from
Marx's book, The Civil War in France.’

Lenin goes on:

‘Marx's idea is that the working class must break up, smash
the "ready-made state machinery", and not confine itself merely to
laying hold of it.

‘On April 12, 1871, i.e., just at the time of the Commune,
Marx wrote to Kugelmann:

‘"If you look up
the last chapter of my Eighteenth Brumaire, you will find that I declare that
the next attempt of the French Revolution will be no longer, as before, to
transfer the bureaucratic-military machine from one hand to another, but to
smash it [Marx's italics--the original is
zerbrechen], and this is the
precondition for every real people's revolution on the Continent. And this is
what our heroic Party comrades in Paris are attempting."’

Lenin proceeds:

‘Today,
[i.e. in 1917] in Britain and America, too, "the precondition for every
real people's revolution" is the smashing, the destruction of the
"ready-made state machinery”…

‘Secondly,
particular attention should be paid to Marx's extremely profound remark that
the destruction of the bureaucratic-military state machine is "the
precondition for every real people's revolution". This idea of a
"people's revolution” seems strange coming from Marx, so that the Russian
Plekhanovites and Mensheviks, those followers of Struve who wish to be regarded
as Marxists, might possibly declare such an expression to be a "slip of
the pen" on Marx's part. They have reduced Marxism to such a state of
wretchedly liberal distortion that nothing exists for them beyond the
antithesis between bourgeois revolution and proletarian revolution, and even
this antithesis they interpret in an utterly lifeless way.

‘If we take
the revolutions of the 20th century as examples we shall, of course, have to
admit that the Portuguese and the Turkish revolutions are both bourgeois
revolutions. Neither of them, however, is a "people's" revolution,
since in neither does the mass of the people, their vast majority, come out
actively, independently, with their own economic and political demands to any
noticeable degree. By contrast, although the Russian bourgeois revolution of
1905-07 displayed no such "brilliant" successes as at the time fell
to the Portuguese and Turkish revolutions, it was undoubtedly a "real
people's" revolution, since the mass of the people, their majority, the
very lowest social groups, crushed by oppression and exploitation, rose
independently and stamped on the entire course of the revolution the imprint of
their own demands, their attempt to build in their own way a new society in
place of the old society that was being destroyed.

‘In Europe,
in 1871, the proletariat did not constitute the majority of the people in any
country on the Continent. A "people's" revolution, one actually
sweeping the majority into its stream, could be such only if it embraced both
the proletariat and the peasants. These two classes then constituted the
"people". These two classes are united by the fact that the
"bureaucratic-military state machine" oppresses, crushes, exploits
them. To smash this machine, to break it up, is truly in the interest of the
"people", of their majority, of the workers and most of the peasants,
is "the precondition" for a free alliance of the poor peasant and the
proletarians, whereas without such an alliance democracy is unstable and
socialist transformation is impossible.’

The lessons
of the Paris Commune are many. Here are some of Marx’s own words from our
chosen chapter:

“…no sooner do the
working men anywhere take the subject [emancipation of labour] into their own
hands with a will, than uprises at once all the apologetic phraseology of the
mouthpieces of present society with its two poles of capital and wages-slavery
(the landlord now is but the sleeping partner of the capitalist), as if the
capitalist society was still in its purest state of virgin innocence, with its
antagonisms still undeveloped, with its delusions still unexploded, with its
prostitute realities not yet laid bare. The Commune, they exclaim, intends to
abolish property, the basis of all civilization!

“Yes, gentlemen, the
Commune intended to abolish that class property which makes the labour of the
many the wealth of the few. It aimed at the expropriation of the expropriators.
It wanted to make individual property a truth by transforming the means of
production, land, and capital, now chiefly the means of enslaving and
exploiting labour, into mere instruments of free and associated labour. But
this is communism, "impossible" communism! Why, those member of the
ruling classes who are intelligent enough to perceive the impossibility of
continuing the present system — and they are many — have become the obtrusive
and full-mouthed apostles of co-operative production.

“If co-operative
production is not to remain a sham and a snare; if it is to supersede the
capitalist system; if united co-operative societies are to regulate national
production upon common plan, thus taking it under their own control, and
putting an end to the constant anarchy and periodical convulsions which are the
fatality of capitalist production — what else, gentlemen, would it be but
communism, "possible" communism?”

Factual note: What had happened in France was that
Louis Bonaparte, the nobody, the returned exile, who juggled the classes and
deceived them all, had made himself an “Emperor”. But he ran out of options
after two decades in power. He decided to make a foolish war on the Prussians,
who beat the French and advanced to Versailles, outside Paris. The French
government then abandoned Paris like cowards: Hence the formation of the
self-governing Paris Commune. In Versailles, a suburb of royal palaces, the
Germans (Prussians and others) for the first time agreed among themselves to
form a single nation, while at the same time licensing and assisting the
defeated French bourgeoisie to destroy their own compatriots in Paris.